Heirs of Empire

She sat behind her desk and drew a deep breath. It was time to return to the needs of the living. Gus van Gelder and her ONI assistants had been carrying her load, and that they’d done it superlatively was scant comfort. It was her job; if she couldn’t do it, it was time to curl up and die. For a time she’d considered doing just that, but even at her worst, a stubborn part of her had mocked the bad melodrama of the thought.

Now, deliberately, she buried the temptation forever and felt herself coming back to life as she set her grief aside. It wasn’t easy, and it hurt, but it also felt good. Not as it once had, but so much better than the dull, dead disinterest which had gripped her for far too long, and she plugged her feed into her computer and called up the first intelligence summary.

* * *

Colin sat on the rug, watching the fire and rubbing Galahad’s ears. The dog lay beside him before the library hearth, eyes half-closed, massive head resting on Colin’s thigh while they both stared into the crackling flames. To the outward eye they must present the classic picture of a man and his dog, Colin thought, but Galahad certainly wasn’t his pet. Galahad and his litter-mates shared a very dog-like exuberant openness, insatiable curiosity, and a need for companionship, but they belonged only to themselves.

Now Galahad emitted a contented snuffle and rolled onto his back, waggling his feet in the air to invite his friend to scratch his chest. Colin complied with a grin, and chuckled as the dog wiggled with soft, chuffling sounds of sensual delight. That grin felt good. The four-footed members of the imperial family had done more than anyone else would ever suspect to help with his and ’Tanni’s grief. They shared it, for they, too, had loved the twins, but there was a clean, healthy simplicity to their caring, without the complex patterns of guilt and subliminal resentment even the best humans felt while they grappled with their own loss.

“Like that, do you?” he said, working his scratching fingertips into Galahad’s “armpits,” and the big dog sighed.

“Of course,” his vocoder replied. “It is a pity we do not have hands. I would enjoy doing this for the others.”

“But not as much as you’d enjoy having them do it for you, huh?” Colin challenged, and Galahad sneezed explosively and rolled upright.

“Perhaps not,” he agreed, and Colin snorted. None of the dogs ever lied. That seemed to be a human talent they couldn’t (or didn’t want to) master, but they were getting pretty darn good at equivocating.

“I think humans are a bad influence on you. You’re getting spoiled.”

“No. It is only that we are honest about things we enjoy.”

“Yeah, sure.” Colin reached under Galahad’s massive chest and stroked more gently. The standing dog’s chin rested companionably on his shoulder, and he glanced over at the corner where Galahad’s sister Gwynevere sat very upright, watching Jiltanith move her queen. Gwynevere cocked her head, ears pricking as she considered the move. She was the only one of the dogs to develop a taste for chess—it was a bit too cerebral for the others— and by human standards she wasn’t all that good. Galahad and Gawain were killers at Scrabble, and he’d been horrified to discover Horus had taught all of them to play poker (though none of them—except, perhaps, Gaheris— could bluff worth a damn), but Gwynevere was determined to master chess. And, to be fair about it, she was improving steadily.

The really funny thing, he thought, was that while Jiltanith was an excellent strategist in real life, Gwynevere beat her quite often. ’Tanni was too direct—and impatient—for a game which emphasized the indirect approach.

“Excuse me, Colin,” Dahak’s voice said, “but Ninhursag has just arrived at the Palace.”

“She’s here now?” Colin looked up, and Jiltanith met his eyes with matching surprise. It was very late in Birhat’s twenty-eight-hour day.

“Indeed. And she appears quite agitated.”

” ’Hursag is agitated?” Colin shook his head and scrambled to his feet. “Tell her to come on down to the library.”

“She is already on her way. In fact—”

The library door burst open. Admiral MacMahan came through it like a thunder squall, and Colin rocked back on his heels—literally. Ninhursag was only middling tall, and the mood he usually associated with her was one of deliberate consideration, but tonight she was a titan wrapped in vicious, killing rage.

“ ’Hursag?” he said tentatively as she came to a halt just inside the door. Every movement was rigidly over-controlled, as if each of them took every ounce of will she had, and she chopped a nod.

“Colin. Jiltanith.” Her voice was harsh, each word bitten off with utter precision. “Sit down, both of you. I have something to tell you.”

Colin looked at Jiltanith, wondering what could have transformed Ninhursag so, but ’Tanni met his eyes with a shrug of ignorance and a slight gesture at the chairs before the hearth. They settled into them, listening to the crackle of burning logs as Galahad and his siblings ranged themselves to either side, and every eye, human and canine alike, watched Ninhursag grip her hands behind her and make herself take a quick, wordless turn about the room. When she turned to face them, her face was calmer, but it was a surface calm, built solely from professionalism and self-discipline.

“I’m sorry to burst in on you, but I just turned up something … interesting. Or, rather, I just confirmed something interesting.”

She inhaled again, sharply, and gave herself a tiny shake.

“I’ve been slacking off at ONI for months,” she continued in a flat voice. “You know that, Colin, though you haven’t said anything. I’m sorry. You know why I have. But I’m getting myself back together, and yesterday I started through a stack of reports that’ve been accumulating since, well—” She broke off with another shrug, and Colin nodded. Jiltanith held out a hand to him, and he took it as Ninhursag cleared her throat.

“Yes. Anyway, most of them were fairly routine. Gus and Commodore Sung have handled the hot stuff as it came in. But one of them—an accidental death report—caught my attention. It was the date, I think. It happened two days after Imperial Terra hypered out for Urahan, and it covered an entire family.” Fresh pain tightened her lips, but she went harshly on.

“They were civilians, and it was a traffic accident, so I wondered why ONI had it, until I looked more closely,” Ninhursag went on in that flat voice. “The husband was Vincente Cruz. He wasn’t military, strictly speaking, but—” she paused, and her eyes were cold “—he worked for BuShips.”

Colin felt Jiltanith’s hand twitch in his and stiffened. It was no more than a vague stirring of suspicion, but the bitterness in Ninhursag’s eyes turned something cold and wary deep inside him.

“I don’t know why that stuck in my mind, but it did, and when I looked more closely I found a couple of things that seemed … out of kilter.

“The Cruzes lived on Birhat, since he worked for BuShips, but they were killed on Earth. I checked and found out they usually vacationed in North America, but Cruz had returned from there less than three months before, so I wondered why they’d gone back so soon. Then I found out his wife and family had stayed there— visiting friends—and he’d gone back to collect them.

“Again, I don’t know why that bothered me, but it did. So I did some more checking. Cruz’s two older children were enrolled for education here on Birhat, and I discovered that he hadn’t warned the education people they’d be staying on Earth. He notified them only after he got back, but two years ago, when he left them to visit family in Mexico, he’d notified their teachers over a month before they left. He was concerned with making certain they didn’t lose any ground shifting back and forth between the two school systems.

“That seemed odd, so I checked the hypercom and mat-trans logs. In the ten weeks they stayed on Earth, he neither sent to them nor received from them a single hypercom message. Nor did he use the mat-trans to visit them in person. There was no communication between them at all for ten weeks … and he and his wife had a ten-month-old baby.”

Colin’s eyes began to burn with a green fire that matched the fury in Ninhursag’s bitter brown stare, and the admiral nodded slowly.

“The accident report looks completely aboveboard, if a bit freakish. It was a high-speed event—a ridge-line collision at almost Mach six—and the flight recorder was totaled, but the altimeter was recovered, and analysis